


Sparing No Pains

by thegildedmagpie



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Academia ruins everything, BDSM, Darkening of Valinor, Ear Piercing, Friendship, House of Finwë - Freeform, M/M, Piercings, Teaching, Valar are not actually quite like elves, Valinor, Warrior types, Worship, following a train of thought to its logical conclusion, hinted at in an elegant elfy way, the first rule of Valinor Fight Club is you have to talk at length about Valinor Fight Club
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 03:32:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5032099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegildedmagpie/pseuds/thegildedmagpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not every elf who left Valinor would have cared much for the Silmarils, been impressed by Fëanor or Fingolfin, or held any reasonable ambition of ruling a kingdom.  What would motivate such an elf to leave?  </p>
<p>A scholar from Finwë's court explains how he came to be disenchanted by the Valar's motives, even as he participated in glorious lengths to which a Noldo might take their worship.</p>
<p>No, I don't like first person either.  It's okay.</p>
<p>(Views about the Valar expressed by the speaker in this story do not necessarily reflect those of the author.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sparing No Pains

Tulkas was my friend, and that made it hard for people to understand how I could leave him.

It was different with other Vala. Ulmo, Irmo, even Oromë seemed to have beloved ones, favorites, one would venture even to say lovers – but fundamentally, those favored ones were worshippers. Tulkas seemed to have friends.

I was born to parents who had come to Valinor from the star-dusted darkness of Middle-Earth amongst Finwë's people and who encouraged me to show the Valar my gratitude for the bright new world we had been brought to live in. I remember being so small, young enough that I was unsteady as I left my mother's hands to reach up and tuck a flower into those that wreathed the mane of Oromë's kneeling steed.

When I was older I became a scholar. I liked to search for answers, to think things through and explain them, and in those days it was a difficult and rewarding pursuit. In Valinor we had built no history to speak of, but we had been a wondering, wandering people in Middle-Earth, and it was thought a great craft and skill to forge connections between things that we had seen and known and named there, and the new knowledge that Valinor could provide. I specialized, too, in inventing explanations for things that we could not explain, finding something that sounded satisfying, then testing it without tiring until we could state with confidence a theory about ourselves and how Eru Iluvatar had made us to be. I did this work in Finwë's court, one among his many loremasters, not counted the first nor the last of them.

I may, though, have been counted among the oddest, for I also spent most of my free time with Tulkas.

Others couldn't understand why a scholar chose to spend all his time with the embodiment of physical prowess. Tulkas couldn't understand how anyone so obviously suited to him had become a scholar. While he had always a group of regular companions – how could his laughing glory have been contented without someone to laugh with? – many would fall away exhausted, transferring their loyalties to Oromë or to Yavanna or, in one particularly dramatic case of overtiring, to Irmo. Those who couldn't keep up with Tulkas always feared his disappointment in them. He never showed any, though. Tulkas only embraced whatever new companion had come to witness his glory in the absent one's place, and he laughed in eagerness, and we all laughed with him in the fell, wild joy of combatants who knew exactly their own strength.

But I never fell away from him. I rode in Oromë's hunt, and I helped create illumined offerings to Aulë, and I even gave my first bedding in Estë's temple in a year when she found the number of celebrants one short, but Tulkas had my loyalty and my love, and I never left his service. I would make use of my mind with the stillness of the great study and the strength to be found in shaping words to match that which seemed at first impossible to understand, and with the ease of sitting among princes' children to help them learn of the world that had been made for them, a small boy on my knee and small voices delightedly tumbling over each other as they eagerly shared their theories on the things they knew. Then, I would make use of my body with the contests of strength in which our lord delighted, learning what I could do, learning the limits of the fair form we'd been given in which to experience the world and make our will known. One passion refreshed the other, and I was happy.

I began to find ways that knowledge could serve Tulkas, too. I am not a healer, not as such, but when someone overstretched his limits or accidentally hurt a partner in Tulkas' violent revels, I learned to provide the immediate succor before the healers' work began, and the long-term support and assistance that would be needed after the healers' work was done. And I knew so much of the body now, for I had striven to find theoretical explanations for its workings that would bear out in fact; I could help others test their limits and know their boundaries, a task in which I found a satisfaction above all others. I took a lover among his other favorites, a big, fair, grey-eyed warrior; he used to wear a slim ring pierced through the tip of his left ear as a mark of the way he honored what my hands could do to him. I took a second lover, a young, fragile, doe-eyed boy who had never thought himself strong; I delivered him up to Tulkas, under whose merry supervision he learned a wicked instinct for combat, and in gratitude for my teaching and for how I could still show him where the borders of the land of his endurance lay, the boy wore a ring through his ear on the right.

Still Tulkas never understood how I could be both a scholar and one of his prized combatants. He asked me again and again, and as he asked he always laughed.

He always asked. He always laughed. He never came to understand.

I still laughed with him, but I laughed because I understood and he did not. He alone would not hear the explanations that others craved.

Yet it was not he alone, was it? For could I imagine explaining something to any Vala, ever? Could I imagine them caring to learn from the Eldar as we so eagerly learned from them? Would Mandos have listened to a theory from even one of his precious Vanyarin as an equal – or even as I would listen to an eager child learning on my knee? I thought that the answer was no. But I hesitated, the reverence my parents had taught me staying my hand from testing this theory, and I sought alternative explanations for the inexplicable anxiety at the back of my mind.

I did not part from my friend even then. And he did not stop asking.

At last I came to know the truth in a way that did not brook further enquiry. The Valar had come to Middle-Earth to fetch us back out of a sense of duty, but they wanted us with him because they found us fair to look upon and pleasing to watch. Aulë, the proud patron of my people, was delighted by the things we could make under his guidance, but he was delighted because we worked in his name; he saw even invention as an art he had taught us. Irmo and Estë found joy in giving us solace, but not in the same way that I found joy in teaching, but in the way that one might enjoy rescuing fallen little birds and keeping them where, if only a little, they can fly. We made them good worshippers, good lovers, good toys, and here is the thing that made it hurt so pointlessly: they probably could not imagine treating us differently. 

Ulmo, I argued with myself, loved us; even if his absence from our revels and our feasts and our daily way of living began to feel like the best proof.

Another thought came then to my mind, stringently trained to follow a line of thoughts to its end: Every Vala but three was given an equal in mind and body and face and form, and perhaps that satisfied their need to understand another person, to see someone as a person. Alone and without a spouse were Ulmo, who was rarely among us and seemed, in his distant way, to love us; and Melkor, who was among us always in those days, who was not wholly untrusted then, but who we knew had somehow learned to loathe us?

And then, was it Nienna, ever weeping, who of them all really knew us best?

I remained a favorite of Tulkas my friend. He remained a favorite of mine. I did not stop loving him only because I knew him not capable of loving me back in a way that I would recognize as love.

But when Valinor darkened, light was shed at last on what I already knew: For all they told us that we were free, and we certainly were not the prisoners or slaves that fey Fëanor claimed us to be, we were as pretty pets to them; or as children to a cosseting, selfish parent who does not know their own selfishness in making their child revere them. I left my two lovers. I left my parents. I left the Vala I loved and the home I'd been born to. I left because I knew something that could not be unknown again, and there were others who had only just come to know it and who might need my help to understand why this had befallen us. It was that knowledge which brought me through Alqualondë and across the ice and unto these shores. I'd found a duty as a teacher which I held higher than my loyalty to my laughing Vala lord.

So no, young one, I would not return to Valinor before the world's uttermost ending, even if our pardon were granted and our presence plaintively recalled. I would miss Tulkas and I would wish to see him again.

But if Tulkas wants me, then he can come to me.


End file.
